


Tu Vas me Détruire

by orphan_account



Category: Portal (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-27
Updated: 2013-06-27
Packaged: 2017-12-16 07:55:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/859737
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When she is thrust into the outside world, she doesn't know what to do or where to go. She considers everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tu Vas me Détruire

**Author's Note:**

> The title translates to "You Will Destroy Me," the title of one of my favorite songs from the 1998 musical, Notre Dame de Paris. I suggest you give it a listen.

When she leaves (is kicked out, rather) things do not get better. Indeed, they become definitively worse. She would die, alone in the dirt, like an animal, she thought. The field seemed to stretch on for miles in all directions. If she looked over her shoulder, she could still see the tiny shed on the horizon, despite having walked for nearly three days now. The water bottle she kept tucked in one of her long fall boots (“You’re not going to starve, obviously,” GLaDOS had snapped after Chell fainted in the middle of a test, “but you’re ruining the data. Drink.”) was nearly empty, with barely a sip left in the bottom. The sun was burning against her back, and though she would swear that there was a smudge up ahead that could maybe, possibly be people, or water, or anything, she really couldn’t be sure.

  
When night fell, she did not sleep. She was afraid she would wake up in the test chambers again. She was afraid she would wake up in the field; still, far away from the only way she knew how to live. It was _almost_ funny, she thought. If someone had told her that she would miss all the sharp angles and words and something else (something distinctly robotic and sarcastic that she could not yet bring herself to name, even in her most private thoughts) just days ago, she would have laughed in their face. She tried to laugh now, bitter and angry, but she made only a harsh croak. She coughed.

  
If she didn’t die for lack of water, or food, or shelter, then she would die from the gel. She remembered what the recording had said; deep down underneath Aperture, when GLaDOS had seemed so human and vulnerable, and Chell had almost pitied her. Cave Johnson had called the moon rocks poison. Even she knew that being coated in the conversion gel was a terrible idea, but at the time, she hadn’t thought of that. It was only in these few days of freedom that the deep, rattling cough had seized her. GLaDOS had said that killing her would be hard. But maybe she had meant that just letting Chell die would be easy.

  
They had spent more time together than Chell had spent with anyone else, ever, in her whole life. Maybe that was why, in those final days, she had allowed herself to think of GLaDOS as not irredeemable, not totally lost to the sands of time and corrupted coding. She would blame PotaDOS, too, when she was pressed. GLaDOS at least had been large and distant and untouchable, forcing Chell to keep her distance. But when she was ripped from her chassis (the scream still woke her, in the belly of the labs, and in the test chambers, and now in The Outside) and thrown down, folded into such a tiny, tender package, everything changed. Chell was the caretaker.

  
All of the sudden, she had the power, and she hadn’t done a damn thing with it. She had carried GLaDOS around. She’d restored her to her throne, and let her cast her out like a vagrant. Though the aria echoed in her ears, she found it was not the glorious escape or the sweet farewell that she had daydreamed about. There in the lift, with synthetic voices soaring around her, she had finally admitted that she had come to love her captor more than she reviled her. The burning in her stomach had been assuaged by the cool labyrinth miles beneath her feet that likely stretched farther than she could ever hope to fathom, where she had curled around a potato and slept soundly despite low grumbling about stasis from her ward. Her nemesis. Her something-or-other.

  
Obviously, everything had been left unsaid between them. Chell had before refused to speak, and now she found she could not speak at all. Her voice was forfeit to the walls of the facility, long lost to her. Everything seemed lost, though the horizon was turning a sort of pink.

  
The sun was rising very slowly, and for one unmoving moment she allowed herself to entertain the idea of going back. Even if she did, it was likely that she would not be allowed back in. And what was the use, anyways? She was sick to her bones of testing. She was deathly tired of running and falling and jumping and all those damned portals. She was just sick. That place had built her and destroyed her and abandoned her, all in one fell swoop.

  
She stood shakily; focusing in the early light on the smudge that she was now quite sure was real. She would get there. She looked up, noting the few dark clouds hanging overhead. Maybe rain? She could only hope. She took a step away from the shed. Another step. A low rumble. She would get there. She could only hope.


End file.
